The fact that years later people still don't know that BadBIOS wasn't "real" speaks volumes about how this whole incident is going to be remembered. All of the sensational claims get reported everywhere while the eventual retractions are largely ignored.

In the case of BadBIOS there was no retraction. The person who claimed to have found it kept on insisting he did, but he never posted the malware. He just kept on making unverifiable claims and posting meaningless spectrograms and ignoring calls to just show us the code he says he has.

What if every single scientific discovery in history was forwarded to a bunch of public-facing guys who said, "Nope, this isn't true." Where would we be then? Remember Galileo? Every single person technical person worth their salt owes themselves the favor of doing their own research, and forming their own opinions. I don't know if BadBIOS is real or not, but until I've done my own research and reached my own conclusions, I (politely!) refuse to take other people's opinion on the matter. Unverified claims? By who? I refuse to believe what amounts to speculation, conjecture and hearsay by any party! Also, please think about "The Streisand Effect" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) when you make posts deferring to debunking by a supposed authority. All I know is that before you posted, I was not interested in BadBIOS... now I am... and I'm going to do my own research on the matter.